Wishing you a well deserved vacation and the happiest of holidays! We hope you’ve gotten great use out of our Winter & Snow Spotlight. It will also be available in January. We’ve got an exciting new Spotlight for January — stay posted!
Stay warm!
Allisyn & the BrainPOP team
We hope you’ll explore our Spotlight on Early Americans if you haven’t already. We’re featuring a lesson plan on Thanksgiving, and our Thanksgiving movie will be free through Sunday! It features 3 great Activity Pages (including short answers, a graphic organizer and vocabulary), and a fun, fact-filled FYI full of extension possibilities. For K-3 content, check out BrainPOP Jr.’s Thanksgiving movie.
Enjoy, and have a Happy Thanksgiving!
We always love reading about how teachers and students use BrainPOP on these two blogs… That’s why we’re nominating them for the 2008 Edublog Awards! Please check out our nominees below!
For Best educational use of video/visual, we nominate:
Robert Miller is a fourth and fifth grade teacher at Port Orange Elementary in Port Orange, Florida. He inspires his students to create BrainPOP-inspired videos and podcasts, which are as entertaining as they are educational. You can really get a sense of the emphasis Robert places on process with his students, and it’s clear they love learning!
For Best class blog, we nominate:
http://kootmansclass.blogspot.com/
Dave Kootman is a fourth grade teacher at Mary Fay Pendleton Elementary School on Marine Corps Base Camp Pendleton in Oceanside, CA. He does a fantastic job getting his students involved in writing their blog. We are always excited to hear from his students how they are using BrainPOP in their studies.
Are you doing great stuff with BrainPOP on your classroom websites or blogs? Tell us about it by posting below!
I always find it fascinating to hear what’s happening in education abroad. We are so fortunate to have connected with Jan MacNamara, the Primary Library and Information Services teacher, at a one-to-one laptop school all the way in Queensland, Australia. Jan will be presenting BrainPOP at the VITTA conference this week, and was kind enough to share some thoughts on using BrainPOP and BrainPOP Jr. with her students. Take a look and please let us know what you think below!
Differentiation is so important in the classroom. My students are selecting their own areas of investigation from the truckload of choice that is BrainPOP. They might choose to work alone or with a friend. There is no problem working in BrainPOP or BrainPOP Jr. My ESL students work by switching between both areas. (more…)
We hear about how well BrainPOP works with interactive whiteboards and clickers (student response systems) all the time! I just read a great article by Diane Trim, “Interactive Whiteboards & Clickers in the Classroom“, that shares how one teacher integrates BrainPOP and these two technologies.
I’d love to expand on these ideas and hear how you are using BrainPOP with interactive whiteboards and clickers in your classrooms! Please post your comments below or email me and let me know!
Today I’m reporting live from the T+L Conference in Seattle! We’ve really been enjoying this conference, meeting educators from all over and sharing ideas on integrating BrainPOP. We had such a fantastic turnout at yesterday’s workshop, “Integrating BrainPOP Into Your K-12 Curriculum,” that the fire marshall ordered people away! If you missed out, check out our professional development resources. Keep an eye out for upcoming guest bloggers by our incredible special guest educators who joined us at our booth. If you were able to join us in Seattle or stopped in at our booth, we’d love to hear what you thought! Please post comments below!
Get into the swing of science with our new Spotlight on Science Skills! Whether your school science fair is now or later in the school year, you can get your students thinking about the how’s of scientific inquiry. Warm up with our Scientific Method Quiz to see what your class already knows. Introduce students to (or review!) the Scientific Method movie, and help get their minds into gear about how to do a Science Project or experiment in class. Explore other movies to get some inspiration, from biological Classification to Types of Rocks to Microscopes and Telescopes. Don’t forget K-3 Science Skills resources for BrainPOP Jr. users! Lastly, enjoy seeing BrainPOP in action in different classrooms with our free science tutorial videos!
As the Presidential election draws nearer, we want to draw your attention to even more resources.
We’re excited to partner with The National Student/Parent Mock Election and provide them with BrainPOP Election Spotlight content. A mock election provides an excellent experiential learning opportunity for students. As students participate in an important lesson in democracy firsthand, they not only become empowered- they leap out of the classroom and into the real world!
We hope you will participate in the mock election and spread the word to your colleagues. Let us know how it goes by posting comments here!
Students and teachers at Bonita Springs Middle School in Bonita Springs, FL, wanted BrainPOP so badly that they decided to hold a fundraiser. The students who raised the most money got to be principal for a day! I spoke with Janet, their Technology Specialist, who explained that they have strong technology teachers on their staff who convinced other teachers their school needed BrainPOP. Read more about their creative solution to funding BrainPOP here.
Do you have a great story about how you got BrainPOP at your school that might give other educators ideas and inspiration? Please post comments below and share your stories!
I am so excited about this new feature in BrainPOP Jr! It now has typeable activities and Talk About It features! So you can model, brainstorm as a class, have students type themselves, or all of the above. Got an interactive whiteboard? Just imagine the possibilities (I’m thinking stamp tools, highlighter, etc…)! You can print them too, of course. Have fun, and let us know what you come up with as you use this new feature with your students!
Loading ...